Drama reigns for Spurs, Lakers in La La Land

LOS ANGELES — The Spurs’ charter flight touched down late Saturday afternoon not far from Hollywood, a place no stranger to drama and dashed dreams, with a cargo hold full of the former if not the latter.

The latest plot twist in their season-long soap opera had come barely 24 hours earlier, with the stunning dismissal of disenchanted small forward Stephen Jackson.

They arrived in Southern California for Sunday night’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers eager to get started on a happy ending to the script.

“We just have to keep pushing,” point guard Tony Parker said. “Nobody’s going to cry for us.”

With three games remaining in a regular season abnormally high on intrigue for the boring old Spurs — from “Rest-gate” in Miami to the lawsuit levied against forward DeJuan Blair by a local jeweler and now Jackson’s untimely pink slip — players would like nothing more than to settle into a sense of normalcy before the start of the playoffs.

In many ways, the latest tempest could be the most challenging to weather.

Though the 35-year-old Jackson was loath to accept his dwindling role on the team, he remained a popular teammate.

Yet management felt it so necessary to remove him from the locker room, it was willing to swallow the roughly $400,000 still owed on Jackson’s contract to be rid of him.

“Jack’s one of my favorite guys to be around and hang out with,” said guard Danny Green, 25. “I look up to him. I thought he was a great locker-room guy. But I don’t make the decisions.”

Tim Duncan, the team’s captain and one of Jackson’s biggest supporters, has been curiously silent on the issue. Parker, the team’s second-longest tenured player, admitted Jackson’s dismissal was “a hard one” to take.

“That’s a big-boss decision,” Parker said.

For the big boss in question — coach Gregg Popovich — the task now is to rally a team that is beaten down physically and perhaps emotionally as well.

Already without Jackson, the Spurs will also open the playoffs next week without forward Boris Diaw, who had surgery Friday to remove a cyst from his lower back.

The status of Manu Ginobili remains in question as he recuperates from a strained right hamstring. Parker’s appearance in Friday’s victory over Sacramento was just his third in April as he nurses a litany of minor ailments.

“We’re still learning each other,” Popovich said. “We’re still trying to get rotations down. No one wants to be in that position at the end of the year, but it’s the way it is.

“You’ve got to deal with it and move on.”

In the midst of the maelstrom, the Spurs have played just well enough to still have an outside shot at claiming the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference.

They will probably need to win the rest of their games, plus receive unlikely help from either Sacramento or Milwaukee against conference-leading Oklahoma City. But mathematically, they are still alive heading into Sunday night at the Staples Center.

If nothing else in this season of suspense, the Spurs have become adept at playing with blinders on.

“There’s not a lot of gossiping about the situation,” guard Gary Neal said. “We try to prepare to win games. That’s our focus.”

If there’s an NBA soap opera that can overshadow “As the Spurs Turn,” it’s the Lakers’ “One Playoff Life to Live.”

Lauded as the next NBA Dream Team last summer after luring Steve Nash and Dwight Howard to join fellow All-Stars Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, the Lakers are clinging to the final playoff seed by a game over Utah.

Now, they must make a last-gasp charge without Bryant, the NBA’s third-leading scorer, who is expected to miss a minimum of six to nine months after undergoing surgery to repair the left Achilles tendon he ruptured Friday against Golden State.

With a loss Sunday, the Lakers would fall back to ninth. As such, the Spurs are expecting the hobbling Lakers to play like a wounded animal.

“They’re extremely dangerous and extremely talented,” Neal said. “When you put desperate and talented together, it could be a problem if we don’t come in with our heads on straight.”

And that is where the middle act of this drama-filled season has arrived for the Spurs. As battered as their bodies have been, what happens next could come down to what’s inside their heads.